Look for part 1 here… and part 2 here.

Uncharted3: Drake’s Deception.

We pick up the adventures of Nathan Drake in a typically grotty pub in south London. He is with Sully, and they are sauntering into the pub; it’s the kind of pub in which you only find men, who are all sitting facing the door. Nathan and Sully pay them no mind, but are waved upstairs by the guv’nor. Oh, and they are wearing suits. Which… a lot of people like. Particularly on Nathan, anyway. Turns out he scrubs up well, given half the chance. So the two go upstairs to a dodgy room filled with dodgy people and a pool table. It transpires that Nate is there to sell the very significant ring that he wears around his neck; the one that belonged to Sir Francis Drake and that he ‘sort of’ inherited. What can possibly have happened to make Nate want to give this up? A briefcase full of money is pushed across the table, and Sully inspects it as the head bad guy (‘cos let’s face it, he’s a bad guy) inspects the ring and declares it real. Sully, however, declares the money to be fake, and Nate snatches the ring back and puts it around his neck again. Then there is a back and forth between the bad guy (his name is Talbot, by the way) and Nate about who is the biggest thief and naughtiest boy out of the two of them. The conversation comes to an abrupt halt when Nate wraps a pool cue around one of the bad guy’s mates’ heads, and all hell breaks loose.

The ensuing brawl eventually spills out onto the street, which is filthy (it *is* south London). Nathan is battling with a bald guy with an attitude. Nate is headbutted, which seems to piss him off. Both Nate and Sully are brought to the ground, and ordered to stay there by the bald guy (whose name is Charlie Cutter) as a very swish, very un-south London car pulls up. Out steps a woman of advancing years, who makes some joke about Nathan and Sully wallowing in the gutter where they belong. Yeah, she knows them. She leans over Nate and after being scary and creepy and horrible she cuts the ring from around his neck, and leaves. She says it is hers. Yeah, right. Nathan leaps up to get It back and Cutter shoots him in the chest. Sully is all “nooooooooo” and that earns him a bullet to the chest, too. Which is kind of sad.

Cut to twenty years earlier and we see a teenage boy walking through a museum in Colombia clearly looking for something. Yeah, OK, it is obvious this little guy is Nathan Drake. He finds what he is looking for; an astrolabe which he starts to draw, but his eye is taken by the ring next to it, which clearly means something to him. Anyway, in walks another, older guy, who also catches Nate’s eye because he looks shifty, and is shifty. He surreptitiously checks the lock with a key on the cabinet that Nate has been interested in. At that point Nathan is ejected from the building by security. Apparently he is more shifty than the shifty guy. Nathan spots the old guy, and follows him. To cut a story short – he steals the guy’s wallet and is caught by him. In the background is a woman who looks a lot like the old woman we just saw in London. And it is her. Katherine Marlowe. Nate is forced to give the wallet back, but he has nicked the key.

Cut to night time; Nathan is breaking back in. He steals both the astrolabe and the ring and in the process discovers that the ring fits into a notch on the astrolabe, working as a key to reveal a secret. Nate is interrupted and caught by Katherine Marlowe and a disappointed looking Sullivan. You knew the older guy with the wallet was Sully, didn’t you? Marlowe tells Nate to give her the items, and he refuses. She snatches the astrolabe, but Nate has spirited the ring away somehow. She isn’t happy, so she slaps him hard across the face. Sully is disgusted, and stops her hitting him again. Nate legs it and is chased by her henchmen. Sully also gives chase, but it seems fairly clear he would rather help Nate escape than catch him and kill him for the ring.

One of the bad guys is lining up to shoot Nathan, who is a kid and very scared, but Sully puts a bullet in the back of the bad guy’s head first. Nathan is not overjoyed about going with Sully, but it seems a better deal than being murdered. So Sully buys Nate breakfast for them both (which seems to include a beer for Sully, which Nate tries to take). The two get to chatting; Nathan only really opens up when he starts talking about the fact that he is descended from Sir Francis Drake. Anyway, the two pal up; Sully promises to teach Nate how to be a slightly more effective thief. That’s what Sully is; he’s a thief for hire, ostensibly.

Cut back to the street in south London to see Nate and Sully rise from the ashes, and Charlie Cutter give them a hand up. Nate chastises Cutter for the headbutt; Cutter seems quite proud of himself. He calls Chloe on his mobile and tells her to look out for the car carrying Katherine Marlowe. They soon meet up with her, and she tells them where they went. Cutter, Sully and Nate follow Marlowe and Talbot and whoever else into their secret underground lair. The three watch as Talbot gives Marlowe the ring that he took from Nathan and as Marlowe loses her cool when the ring doesn’t fit into the astrolabe like it should. Uh-oh. Nate has done a switcheroo and baited Marlowe into taking a fake from him. He still has the real ring. Marlowe twigs that Cutter isn’t very trustworthy. The baddies set off to look for Nathan, Cutter, et al, and while they are away, Nate nicks the astrolabe and the diary of TE Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), which is lying around. He uses the astrolabe with the ring, and it tells him that the figurehead of Drake’s ship; the Golden Hind (which is also in the underground lair) contains a map. Nate retrieves it, and in come the baddies. Nate is slightly too fascinated to worry about being shot at, but eventually he, Charlie and Sully make it out to Chloe, who drives them all back to Cutter’s place, who seems far too civilised to be a south Londoner.

Back at Charlie’s place Nate discovers that Francis Drake and TE Lawrence were after the same thing; Iram of the Pillars, Ubar, or the Atlantis of the Sands. Drake apparently hid this fact from everyone, including the Queen, but now Nate wants to find out why. And the next clues, according to Lawrence’s diary, are in Syria and France.

Charlie and Chloe gallivant off to Syria (much to Chloe’s chagrin) while Sully and Nate swan off to France. Sully and Nate are looking for a chateau owned by a crusader (because that’s what Lawrence’s diary said). They find the tomb of said crusader, and half a stone tablet; the rest of which is presumably in Syria. They are then jumped on by some baddies who leave Nate and Sully to die a horrible death by spiders. Giant, flesh eating spiders that live down there. Not surprisingly, they manage to escape, but the baddies burn the chateau down, with everyone inside. But they escape. Of course.

Nate and Sully twig that Chloe and Charlie might also be in danger, so hot foot it off to Syria to help them. When they get there Charlie and Chloe are a little surprised to see them, despite the place crawling with these baddies. Nathan was worried that he couldn’t get through to them on their mobiles; turns out Chloe’s is broken (“again?”) and Charlie’s is out of credit (“you are using a pe-paid phone!?”). Between them they manage to find the other half of the tablet and a big stone puzzle that tells them they need to go to Yemen.

There are a couple of other interesting and important things that happen in Syra – the first is that Charlie is drugged by Talbot. The drug allows Talbot to use mind control on Charlie, who is made to try and kill Nate. Nate is rescued by Chloe and Sully (who was prepared to kill Charlie to stop him killing Nate) but the mood is now a little sombre. They all know it wasn’t Charlie’s fault but still, it kind of sucks. Later on, while they are trying to get the hell out of Dodge, Charlie is waylaid by Marlowe and co. She sets fire to the tower Charlie is standing on, forcing him to jump and break his legs. That kinda puts him out of action, and Chloe has also had enough, so they both bugger off home. The other interesting and important thing that happens in Syria is that we figure out that Elena is currently living in Yemen, and Nate isn’t thrilled about that. They need to call her to get them in quietly.

So cut to the airport in Yemen; Elena is looking all lovely, and is wearing a wedding ring. Nate isn’t. Elena says she only wears it because it makes life easier for her. So their relationship escalated and deescalated quickly after the end of Uncharted2… Elena got fed up with Nate’s obsession and… Nateness so they split. The three of them find a big well in the ground which has the symbol on it that tells them this is where they need to be.  They all descend, and inside they find some massive puzzles, which reveal more flesh eating spiders, and a star map that shows them the location of Ubar. Sully will be able to find it because he used to be a sailor. Elena, on the other hand is getting more and more pissed off with Nate who seems hell bent on completing this mission, despite the fact all the signs point to it being a stupid idea.

Once they emerge from the big well, Nate is drugged with a dart in the same way as Charlie was. Nate knows what is going to happen so he legs it. However, he trips balls and eventually comes to, minus the ring, sat at a table with Marlowe and a mean looking pirate named Ramses.

This scene is really important.

Marlowe now wants to find Sully because he knows where Ubar is. Nate doesn’t even know, though. But that doesn’t stop Marlowe from trying to persuade him to give Sully up by implying that Sully only ever took an interest in Nathan because of Nathan’s abilities, and what he could get out of him. However, Nate spoils that party by not believing a word of it. Marlowe gets really nasty when she reveals that she knows stuff about Nathan that we didn’t even know, and that is that his mother committed suicide when he was five, and his father gave him up to the state. Nathan was then bought up in an orphanage, at which he developed an interest for history, and from which he ran when he was about 13. He became particularly fascinated with Sir Francis Drake, and so took his name. The point is that he is not descended from Drake as he has always said he was; it was just a lie to escape his awful childhood.

We then learn that Sullivan has been spotted, so in an attempt to get there first, Nate flips the table and does a runner. This escapade is brought to a halt when he is smacked over the head by Ramses. When Nate awakes, he is being held by Ramses who wants to know where Ubar is. Nate doesn’t know. Ramses says “it doesn’t matter; we’ll just ask Sully who is being held downstairs on my big boat.” Nate isn’t having any of that, so he uses all his Nateness to get free and beat the crap out of the guys keeping him captive. He goes on a wild goose chase (which culminates on the lower deck of said big boat (where Sully isn’t being held (it was a motivational lie))) and in his anger he accidentally sinks the cruise liner, still one Sully short of a full set.

Nathan washes up back on shore and seeks out his ex-wife. Things must be really bad if your ex is the only person who can help, but it turns out Elena, who is infinitely awesome, can help. In fact she was going to go after him herself. She and Nate are going to parachute onto the convoy that’s on its way to Ubar.  Sully is being held in said convoy, and said convoy is in need of a supply drop. What could possibly go wrong? Nate gives Elena the slip, and ends up going alone, because he still really loves her and thinks she would be best off not dying in the desert. As ever, things don’t go to plan, and the plane crashes, leaving Nathan stranded in the middle of pretty much nowhere. There’s a long scene which can not be adequately described in text; but we see Nate stumbling through the desert slowly losing his mind, and hallucinating about Sully over and over. It’s pretty damn emotional, to be honest. Buy a PS3 and play it. Seriously. Anyway, Nate finds an abandoned village, which the convoy has seemingly left some baddies at. They must be getting close. There’s a gunfight, and ultimately Nate is rescued by some of the Bedouin tribe, one of whom is called Salim and gets anxious when Nate says they are looking for Ubar. This is not a good idea, warns Salim, and they must be stopped. Nathan, I think would really rather just go home, but he also really wants to make sure Sully is OK. Salim helps Nate to catch up to Sully and the two of them (Nate and Sully) enter Ubar (which has now been located) and Sully is promptly murdered by Talbot. Nate loses his shit (rightly so) and rampages  through Ubar after Talbot in an ever trippier hallucination of weirdness. When Nate is at his absolute low, out steps Sully whom he almost shoots again. Nate doesn’t know what to think, but Sully, who isn’t dead explains that Nate began his mega trip just after he drank some water in Ubar. So that is what Marlowe is after; some more mind control drug juice, which is in the water. Nate and Sully save the day, and prevent this biological weapon from being released into the world. In the final showdown (after Talbot is dead) Marlowe offers Drake’s ring as reward for saving her. Nathan says he doesn’t need it now, but tries to save her. She drowns in a big sinkhole, though.

The closing scene sees Sully telling Nate to stop being a dick and reconcile with Elena, with whom he is clearly still in love. She still loves him, and the three walk off into the sunset together.